Abstract [en]

What is audio description? Why is it important to provide audio description? What is being done to develop audio description in Sweden today? What does access to audio description mean for people with blindness and visual impairment? How can research in various fields contribute to the development of audio description? What can audio description teach us about human thinking, perception and narration?

Audio description (AD) is a phenomenon that has grown in scope in recent years and affects a large part of the population, but is still relatively unknown to the wider public. The contributions in this book want to change that. Here, researchers, educators, persons with visual impairment and blindness, practitioners of AD and government representatives write about audio description from their different perspectives. Audio description is a matter for researchers in cognitive science: Can people who have never seen see things in their mind's eye and create mental images? How can this happen? What is the relationship between language, thought and storytelling? Audio description is an issue of interest for the field of translation studies: How can interpreters convey in spoken words what film makers, actors, and so forth convey by means of visible communicative resources, like images, movement light, gestures and facial expressions? Audio description is a question of quality: How do users of audio description services think that AD can be improved? What are the experiences from other countries? In Spain, for example, research on AD is of longer duration than in Sweden.

The book is the first of its kind in Sweden and Scandinavia. It wants to inspire research, debate and development of audio description and turns – in addition to scientists, practitioners of AD, teachers and users of AD – even to event organizers, government agencies and NGOs, as well as to anyone interested in issues of accessibility.

The editors are Jana Holsanova, Associate professor of cognitive science at the University of Lund, Cecilia Wadensjö, Professor of interpretation and translation at Stockholm University and Mats Andrén, PhD in linguistics, working at Linköping University. The book is co-published by Lund University, Stockholm University and the Swedish Agency for Accessible Media (MTM).